TIFF ’24: What to See at This Year’s Fest, Sept. 7

By Jim Slotek, Liz Braun, Thom Ernst, Karen Gordon, Kim Hughes, John Kirk, Chris Knight, and Liam Lacey

The 49th annual Toronto International Film Festival continues apace, and so do we, rating as many films in capsule form as possible. Please check back daily for updates and be sure to see our opening roundup for titles we are most excited to see. Happy viewing.

Bird

Bird (Special Presentations)

Sat, Sept. 7, 3 pm, TIFF Lightbox 1; Sun, Sept. 8, 11:45 am, TIFF Lightbox 1; Fri, Sept. 13, 9:45 am, Scotiabank Theatre 2.

Gritty social realism somersaults into fairytale magic in the latest from Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Fish Tank), a lively genre-flipping coming-of-age drama about what happens when life get “too real,” to quote the title of the post-punk anthem from the Dublin band D.C. Fontaine in the film’s opening sequence. Twelve-year-old protagonist Bailey (Nykira Adams) lives with her manic man-child of a father Bug (Barry Keoghan), and his fiancé in a graffiti-scrawled tower flat, along with Bailey’s older half-brother, who is part of an adolescent vigilante gang. Bailey’s birth mother and three neglected younger siblings live in a rowhouse nearby. It’s a drug den ruled by the mom’s violent boyfriend. How much reality can one kid take? One day, Bailey wakes up in a field where she meets an oddball young drifter (German actor Franz Rogowski) who says his name is Bird, and he’s looking for his family home. Arnold’s films are replete with animal imagery and here she pushes that to an extreme: Animal tattoos, swarming seagulls, bees and butterflies, a mail-delivering crow, an apparently resurrected dog, and in one comic thread, Bug’s new pet Colorado River toad that produces hallucinogenic slime he hopes to sell to make himself rich. At times, this uneven but ingratiating movie, with its handheld camera and a pumped-up soundtrack, feels like someone took a big old lick of that toad juice. LL

Daniela Forever (Platform)

Sat, Sept. 7, 9 pm, TIFF Lightbox 3; Thurs, Sept. 12, 7:30pm, Scotiabank Theatre 2.

The odd thing about this science-fiction story from Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes, Colossal) is that it’s actually more science than fiction. There really is a thing called lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer is aware that she is dreaming and can choose what happens. The fiction is a new drug that allows Nick (Henry Golding) to enter such a dream state every night — and he chooses to dream about his dead girlfriend (Beatrice Granno), though she does seem a little… blank, given that he’s the one controlling her. There’s more than a little Inception in the film’s DNA, as Nick gains more control over his nightly visions, even as he starts to lose his grip on what’s real. And what happens if you try dreaming within a dream? Daniela Forever runs a little long and doesn’t quick stick the landing, but if you’re into the subject matter it’s still a dream come true. CK

Grand Tour (Wavelengths)

Sat, Sept. 7, 9:45 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 14; Sat, Sept. 14, 9:45 am, Scotiabank Theatre 9.

Clearly, a trip through such Asian cities as Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok and Osaka was a different experience in 1918 than it would be a century later. But director Miguel Gomes melds both experiences — and it works. In the main story, British diplomat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), stationed in Burma, is due to meet his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) after years apart. But he gets cold feet and bolts, only to have the resourceful Molly follow him, always one steamer behind. Those scenes were shot on soundstages. Gomes’ genius move is to intersperse (and sometimes even overlap) footage of the locations as they are today, often festooned with skyscrapers and teeming with traffic. It allows modern audiences to share the sense of dislocation and confusion that Edward would have felt, rather than just have it look quaint. Gomes won the best director prize at Cannes for this one. Well earned, I say. CK

Hard Truths

Hard Truths (Special Presentations)

Sat, Sept. 7, 2 pm, TIFF Lightbox 2.

Who gets to be happy? Filmmaker Mike Leigh continues to investigate the exigencies of contemporary life with a focus on the furious Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), whose grief, anger, and disappointment are taken out on whomever is nearby: her husband, her son, her dentist, her doctor, a salesperson, the cashier — you get the picture. Her sister Chantal (Michele Austin) is a hairdresser with two adult daughters, and she sits at the other end of the joy spectrum, apparently happy all the time. A tough, slow, heartbreaking film about the cards one is dealt in life and the passage of time, with an absolutely spectacular performance from Jean-Baptiste, whose anger is on full boil nearly always. LB

Matt and Mara (Centrepiece)

Wed, Sept. 11, 6 pm, TIFF Lightbox 1; Thurs, Sept. 12, 2:35 pm, Scotiabank 3.

Creative writing professor Mara (Deragh Campbell) shows up at her class and is blindsided by Matt (Matt Johnson). He’s a successful writer living in New York while she’s married with a toddler. It’s clear the two haven’t seen each other in a long time. The reunion is awkward, and she’s frosty, but he seems undeterred. They go for coffee and quickly fall back into a rhythm that raises a lot of questions. We can see there’s a lot of history there between them. Were they once lovers? Or friends who thought about it, but never quite got together? Toronto Director Kazik Radwanski makes naturalistic movies about people who hit a point where it’s clear they don’t really know what they want. At just 80 slender minutes, Matt and Mara is subtle but goes deep. KG

Mr. K

Mr. K (Platform)

Sat, Sept. 7, 2:30 pm, TIFF Lightbox 3; Sun, Sept. 8, 8:45 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 3; Sat, Sept. 14, 9:40 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 7.

If the Eagles wrote a song about the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, Crispin Glover’s character would be staying there in Mr. K. The oddball actor, still best known from Back to the Future, plays a travelling magician who checks into a seedy motel and finds himself unable to check out. But he’s kept busy when he’s dragooned into the kitchen staff, rising swiftly though the ranks despite not even wanting to be there. Best enjoyed if you check your own doubts, disbelief, and inhibitions at the front desk. CK

Seeds (Discovery)

Sat, Sept. 7, 4:30 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 2.

With a plethora of acting credits including a fan favourite role in Letterkenny, Kaniehtiio Horn dives into the deep end as a first-time director, feature-script writer, and star of this Rez revenge tale. It posits her character Ziggy as an online influencer in the city, who returns — smartphone in hand — to find her family targeted by a thug in the payroll of an agribusiness corporation. The last act, where she goes full Mohawk in grisly fashion, fulfills the genre, but it takes a while to get there. The pacing and plot may not be perfect, but Horn’s screen presence and some wry humour (including Graham Greene as a reality TV star who appears to her in visions) carry this decent first effort. JS

Read our interview with Seeds director-star Kaniehtiio Horn

Space Cowboy (TIFF Docs)

Sat, Sept. 7, 9 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 12; Thurs, Sept. 12, 12:45 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 9.

This documentary about the complicated aerial photographer Joe Jennings begins like an episode of Jackass, with Joe and like-minded friends piled into a car that’s dropped off a plane and begins to spin around like a gyroscope. The quest to smoothly drive a car through the air is the narrative connective to the story of a man who’d been half of the world’s number one sky surfing duo and a Hollywood stunt man. Through it all he’s been battling depression (and the loss of friends to aerial accidents). Are his adrenaline-junkie exploits how he treats his pathology? There’s a lot to think about while battling vertigo staring at the screen. JS

The End (Special Presentations)

Wed, Sept. 11, 9:30 pm, Princess of Wales Theatre; Thurs, Sept. 12, 9:00 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 1.

The End is a post-apocalyptic musical about the last human family staring down their demons in an underground bunker. A stranger shows up and the happy family facade begins to crack. The world has ended. People are terrible. Dirge-like warbling abounds. Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon star. The movie is two-and-a-half hours long. IMDb claims director Joshua Oppenheimer has described his film as an exploration of whether we as human beings can come to a place where our guilt is too much to recover from our pasts. We wouldn’t argue. LB

U Are the Universe (Discovery)

Sat, Sept. 7, 9:15 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 9; Mon, Sept. 9, 9:45 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 9; Sat, Sept. 14, 9:05pm, Scotiabank Theatre 8.

Just breeze past director Pavlo Ostrikov's hokey sci-fi setup, a future in which piloted spaceships take nuclear waste to Jupiter’s moon Callisto because — why exactly? — and strap in for a fantastic, emotional story that touches on love, loss, and loneliness on a cosmic scale. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is on his third trip to Callisto — a four-year round trip — when Earth explodes, leaving him with just the ship’s computer for company. But then a message arrives from the female pilot (Alexia Depicker) of another far-flung vessel, forcing this lone wolf to forge a connection with what might be the last human alive besides himself. Shades of TV’s Red Dwarf and Duncan Jones’ Moon (the computer looks a lot like the one in his movie) infuse this deeply human story. Interplanetary space may be cold, but U Are the Universe has a warm beating heart. CK